AUTISTIC

▸ FILE NOTES

The diagnosis arrives via questionnaire. Eighteen yes-or-no questions written in a building you have never been to, by people you will never meet. The result is recorded in a file. The file is shared with parties who do not ask permission to read it. The diagnosis becomes a vector — for school accommodations, for insurance modeling, for state-level reporting.

The trouble is not the condition. The trouble is the framing. The framing says: this is the deficit, here is the remediation. The framing does not say: this is the receiver, here is what it picks up that yours does not.

Subjects diagnosed under the older system reported, at the time, that they noticed patterns. Lights buzzing at sixty cycles. The shift in someone's voice between the second and third sentence. The angle a stranger watches you from across a coffee shop. The shirts they were wearing on different days of the week.

The new system has names for these noticings. It also has medications that quiet them.

The shirt is for the people who never agreed to be quiet.